automake官方文档
Automake is a tool for automatically generating Makefile.ins from files called
Makefile.am. Each Makefile.am is basically a series of make variable definitions1, with
rules being thrown in occasionally. The generated Makefile.ins are compliant with the
GNU Makefile standards.
The GNU Makefile Standards Document (see Section “Makefile Conventions” in The
GNU Coding Standards) is long, complicated, and subject to change. The goal of Automake
is to remove the burden of Makefile maintenance from the back of the individual GNU
maintainer (and put it on the back of the Automake maintainers).
The typical Automake input file is simply a series of variable definitions. Each such file
is processed to create a Makefile.in.
Automake does constrain a project in certain ways; for instance, it assumes that the
project uses Autoconf (see Section “Introduction” in The Autoconf Manual), and enforces
certain restrictions on the configure.ac contents.
Automake requires perl in order to generate the Makefile.ins. However, the distributions created by Automake are fully GNU standards-compliant, and do not require perl in
order to be built.
